Sure Latham has his faults - but he also has something voters crave: integrity.

Has Mark Latham got it in him to be prime minister of Australia? The brief answer: of course.

There is an innate core of belief in Latham that is very close to what the Australian electorate has for years been searching for: integrity.

And if Latham can translate that quality from the Labor Party to the Australian people he can undoubtedly repeat what he has already achieved in the ALP itself: turn himself from contender to champion.

It's a big ask. He's got faults: he's undisciplined, he can be scornful and dismissive, he's bloody sure he's right most of the time, and he can be both conservative and inflexible on key policy issues. He's on the Right of what is at present a very Right-wing party.

But nearly everyone who meets Latham is impressed by him. He has gravitas. He knows what he thinks and says it. And as everyone recognises now, he has passion. He's emotionally as intense and committed as some old-style labour movement men - but his brain is a lot cooler.

So how does he add up as a possible future prime minister?

For a start, Latham is going to change the tone and direction of politics. After the long years of Beazley policy drought and do-nothingness, during which the ALP was sucked deeper and deeper into the Howard slipstream, the nation is finally going to get a Labor Party that sounds and feels different from the Government.

Latham is policy driven. He has a reform agenda. He's absolutely committed to public health, public education, using government power to help those who now inhabit the vast western suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney and their counterparts elsewhere - he's a Westie himself, that's where he grew up, where he lives, and rightly or wrongly, what he regards as the heartland of the nation.

And he has the aggro to push his agenda through a Labor Opposition that for a long time has been unsure of who exactly its constituency is, and what to do about it.

To become prime minister he'd have to appeal to a much wider constituency, of course. He'd have to depend on some of the humour and personal directness he displayed in his media conference yesterday.

If Latham pulls off an amazing political coup and wins next year's election (or the election after that) will he turn into... well, just another politician? "No way," says a Labor man. "He's always been a change advocate." Says Latham: "I'd want a Labor government to make some constructive difference. That's what I'm on about."

The real worry about Latham is not whether he has the strength of will to become prime minister - he has - but just how conservative a leader he would prove to be.

Latham has been hard-line on asylum seekers, immigration policy, and some foreign policy issues. He's basically unsympathetic to some progressive groups: feminists, Aborigines, some ethnic groups. In fact he has an old-fashioned suspicion of the so-called "progressives" in the ALP, labelling them "insiders" who share the faults of the social elites whom Howard delights in attacking but who form the cadre of power groups that support the Liberal-National Coalition.

What Latham doesn't realise is that these progressives are the agenda-setters for the middle class that Labor has to win over. A sentimental attachment to those outside the power loop may blind him to the coalition of new-generation educated Australians (young people, neo-greens, global surfers, even his beloved aspirationals) who must form part of a future Labor constituency.

Latham has a big task ahead of him. He has to turn the ALP around, and then he has to turn the electorate around, and then he has to overcome the immense inertia and backwardness of the past several years and turn the nation around.

But if I know anyone who has the self-will and idealism to do it, Mark Latham is it.